Written by Rena Georgakopoulos-Ueta
Edited by Julia Xu
Of all the times you’ve grabbed an aspirin from your medicine cabinet, you probably haven’t considered where it came from. The company that put aspirin on pharmacy shelves around the world was part of IG Farben, a German chemical giant whose scientists also gave the world synthetic rubber, fuel from coal, and a share of the poison used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. There are few corporations that have done so much to relieve human suffering while profiting so directly from inflicting it.
A Pill Born in a Dye Factory
On August 10, 1897, Felix Hoffmann, a chemist at the dye manufacturer Friedrich Bayer & Co., produced the first sample of pure acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin). The chemistry was actually quite simple and involved attaching an acetyl group to salicylic acid, a compound related to the pain reliever found in willow bark. The change made the original drug much more gentle on the stomach. Bayer began selling it in 1899 under the trademark Aspirin.
In 1925, Bayer merged with BASF, Hoechst, Agfa, and two smaller firms to form IG Farben, then the largest chemical company in the world. Its chemists turned coal into gasoline and invented Buna, a synthetic rubber.
Photos taken by Christina Chen (yc2953@cornell.edu).
The Devil's Chemist
Under the Nazis, IG Farben became so central to Hitler's war machine that it earned the nickname "the devil's chemist." It manufactured the synthetic fuel and rubber Germany could no longer import, and it profited from the seizure of Jewish-owned businesses.
Its most notorious link, however, was a pesticide. IG Farben owned 42.5% of Degesch, the firm that produced Zyklon B, a cyanide-based fumigant. It was first tested by the SS, the Nazi regime’s paramilitary organization, on humans at Auschwitz in the fall of 1941. It would later be used to kill hundreds of thousands in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Majdanek, and countless other camps.
That same year, IG Farben chose to build a huge Buna plant beside Auschwitz, drawn by tax breaks and a near-endless supply of prisoners. For efficiency, the SS built IG Farben its own concentration camp: Monowitz, or Auschwitz III. More than 35,000 slave laborers worked in its factories, and roughly 28,000 of those forced to work for the company died.
Judgment and Breakup
In November 1945, the Allies seized the company. In 1947, 23 of its original directors went on trial at Nuremberg. On July 30, 1948, 13 were sentenced to prison, and 10 were acquitted.
The most senior was Fritz ter Meer, the board member who oversaw the Auschwitz plant. He received seven years for plunder and for mass murder and enslavement. Yet he was released early, and by 1956, he was chairman of the supervisory board of the new Bayer.
Its factories went to three successors that still dominate the chemical world internationally: Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst. The leftover shell, "IG Farben in liquidation," existed to pursue claims for shareholders and creditors. After German reunification in 1990, its state of liquidation became solid per se, as the company pressed claims to eastern factories the Soviets had seized.
Photos taken by Christina Chen (yc2953@cornell.edu).
The Company That Wouldn't Die
When the New York Times visited in 1999, IG Farben was a legal entity, "in liquidation" since 1952 and traded on the Frankfurt stock exchange. It kept small offices and paid lawyers, while former slave laborers struggled to win compensation. Survivors protested at its shareholder meetings.
IG Farben wouldn’t file for insolvency until 2003. Its insolvency administrator asked to remove the shares from the stock exchange in 2011, and the proceedings officially closed in 2012.
Its headquarters in Frankfurt ended up becoming American military offices after the war. Today it houses Goethe University classrooms, and a memorial in its park honors the prisoners of Monowitz.
IG Farben's chemists were brilliant, and their discoveries still ease pain worldwide. But the same skill, serving a murderous state, made killing efficient and profitable. In the end, it is the people that supply conscience to science. On its own, science has no mercy.
(Rena Georgakopoulos-Ueta is in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at rig36@cornell.edu.)
Sources:
The Business World; IG Farben, a Lingering Relic of the Nazi Years, New York Times, 1999
The discovery of aspirin: a reappraisal, Walter Sneader, BMJ, 2000
Felix Hoffmann, Science History Institute
A brief history of ibuprofen, Pharmaceutical Journal
Bayer, Wikipedia
IG Farben / Poelzig Building, Kultur Frankfurt
I.G. Farben, The Holocaust Chronicle
The Headquarters of the American Forces in the Former I.G. Farben Building, German History in Documents and Images
Corporate History: the Farben trial, Bayer AG
I.G. Farben wird von der Börse genommen, CHEManager, 2011
Sole Survivor: Monowitz (Auschwitz III), University of Calgary Press
